


now i am become death, dancer on the event horizon

by EldritchTribble



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Evil!Odo, Gen, Mini-Fic, Post-Canon, but justifiably so, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-25
Updated: 2017-01-25
Packaged: 2018-09-19 22:26:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9462968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EldritchTribble/pseuds/EldritchTribble
Summary: Odo funnels all his prior pain into a new and terrible goal.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this art piece and churned out in a feverish half-hour: http://weyounn.tumblr.com/post/156202834844/early-morning-report
> 
> General warning for disturbing theme & implied death and devastation, though nothing at all graphic in nature.

He tested the rippling surface of its consciousness, suppressing tendrils of thought like justice denied. The Link was everything, knew everything, and it would eventually come to understand the shape of his mind as its own. He liked to think he still held a measure of creative autonomy, though…and the power to keep silent, to take an observable form made of non-thought, proved the greatest power imaginable among a people of pure being, sharing undulations of thought-inscription, stagnating.

He was alone. He had never before realized how much.

Why not? What had kept him from this epiphany all his misbegotten life? Shades, sensations, trajectories of being, they were all useless, utterly useless. This thing they called ‘emotion’, for example: a tool to hold discreteness in check. ‘Principle’? To prevent one shell from amassing too much pull over others.

What was he now, but a manifestation of pure potential? What was anyone?

From the vantage point devoid of contamination he gazed – he saw his life as one immaculate continuum from start to finish, looping back on itself, repeating old mistakes, becoming tangled in association. It need not have been like this. Every slight, every small affront to his exalted nature, it had been an opportunity. An opportunity to inherit a birthright: to become everything they had feared and more. Had he only known. They had shared the merest fraction of his insight, enough to recognize his nature for what it was and to do everything in their power to keep him from the same revelation.

They had failed.

He had been the savior of his people. He. Odo. No-one else could have completed the fate-puzzle quite as elegantly. It would be within his rights to call in a favor. He intended to do so before these thought-inscriptions seeped into the common knowledge, their topologies mapped to perfection.

All the misdirection. All the suffering. From the long view it resembled a parenthesis of purest black, an uncharted region of deep space, a space-time rip…a curiosity. This shell would serve him no longer in its current form. Matter slouches inexorably toward energy. The Odo-that-was, in a crumpled, warped, re-purposed form, must fuel his revenge.

The time was propitious. The Alpha Quadrant would _suffer_. This he considered from the ledge beyond sentiment, beyond conscience, beyond sentience.

It was his final, and perhaps his only ever true, duty – the duty to himself alone.


End file.
